dejected_warp_core
@dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
- Comment on Start-up idea 2 days ago:
The problem here is the for-profit model that drives mass (over-)production and planned obsolescence.
We can do away with this if a company embraces a completely different model. Instead of doing the usual thing, go 100% on-demand with pre-orders, and only build what people want to buy. Then, keep moving horizontally into other product lines, following the demand and manufacturing need. Once pre-orders hit a given theshold, manufacturing starts for a given product. This eliminates all kinds of overhead and allows the company to survive by investing in multiple revenue streams. As a bonus: it’s a lot less wasteful since you never make more units than you can sell.
Subscriptions are like insurance and gym memberships. They’re profitable only if they represent value that is never fully realized by the consumer. They’re a really bad tax, and people dislike them for good reason. I want to buy a thing from a company, and that’s all; it’s not my responsibility to keep them afloat after that transaction.
- Comment on Start-up idea 2 days ago:
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price.
There’s another side to all this. We used to have appliance and, specifically, vacuum repair shops. Sometimes, the latter were franchise operations by manufacturer/brand. Electrolux and Oreck had stores that also did repairs, to name two. The business model had a lot in common with the auto industry at the time. To me, that stands as a cautionary tale of how things can get twisted around to cost the consumer more money in the long run, not less. I think it’s an important consideration, as old designs/patents were from and for a market serviced on all sides by this business model. But we can do better. If such products were designed to be user-servicable, there wouldn’t be a strong need/want to capture breakage as another revenue center.
So, we can absolutely bootstrap a new “buy for life” economy, but I think the downstream user hassle, repair, and secondary costs are crucial to consider.
Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
This is the part people keep ignoring. I keep calling it “realizing the actual cost of things.” Nowadays, you can buy cheap, but you’re going to get something fragile and packed-to-the-gills with surveillance and advertising. To get what grandma had (e.g. a refrigerator that runs for 50 years and just keeps food cold), anything cheaper than the inflation-adjusted equivalent costs you in other ways.
Meanwhile, over in the hobbyist and professional tool world, we’ve been saying “buy nice or buy twice” for a long time now.
- Comment on We really need to bring back the 70s conversation pits 2 days ago:
or my son.
I kid you not, when the realtor showed the house they brought their rambunctious 7-year-old with them. Kiddo wasted zero time and did a running full-gainer into the conversation pit, tucked into a roll on landing, and sprawled out flat to stop in the middle of the room. Realtor/mom was NOT amused. Frankly, I was impressed but also relieved that there was no staged furniture in that particular room.
I hosted a few house-parties over the years and always had to keep a watchful eye on guest’s alcohol intake and all the steps and railings. It was kind of exhausting.
- Comment on We really need to bring back the 70s conversation pits 2 days ago:
I had a house with something like the first one, although it had a railing installed.
At first I hated the railing and considered removing it. Then I slipped on the hardwood steps on my way down into the pit. A whole 20 inches doesn’t seem like a lot, but let me tell you that hitting my ass halfway down was enough to make me re-think all of it.
Aesthetically, conversation pits are amazing, but they are absolutely built to fuck up someone’s day the very moment they’re not being careful.
- Comment on Get that silicussy 5 days ago:
Is that… is that a top-of-the-line graphics card fully-populated with RAM?!
Still hot.
- Comment on Usually a horrible interaction for all involved 1 week ago:
Yuuuuuuup.
Invite also shows up in your inbox an hour or less before meeting time, and is completely irregular from your normal schedule.
Protip: BACK EVERYTHING UP NOW if this happens. There’s a chance that IT hasn’t shut down your access to systems yet.
- Comment on Work smarter, not harder 1 week ago:
I just now realized: someone has the most cursed resume on LinkedIn. I’d expect something in line with this.
- Comment on Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers 1 week ago:
Three times++, actually. The second time was documented to have multiple payload URLs over time.
- Comment on The world is trying to log off U.S. tech 1 week ago:
As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it’s stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.
We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about “market disruption” and “move fast and break things.” But there’s this problem where that group is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there’s a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I’m now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less “damn the man” and more “fuck you, got mine.” Nevermind that it’s not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.
Once you surrender your ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer. It should come as no surprise that aligning one’s self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.
And my personal experience - take with salt - there’s also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They’re highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.
- Comment on Sexting 1 week ago:
I want to see someone try this, get some steamy ankle pics in reply, and then hit it off since they’re on the same (ridiculous) wavelength.
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 1 week ago:
Exactly. We need to build these muscles and demonstrate to other would-be protesters that acting en masse is possible. Otherwise, everyone new to this just feels like they’re sticking their neck out.
- Comment on Cronch 2 weeks ago:
It gets 1000% more fun when you have a lot of dental work.
Was that part of a filling or a crown? Did that damage my fillings?
- Comment on Time traveler 2 weeks ago:
::sigh:: I know what you mean, Vern.
- Comment on xkcd #3196: Aurora Coolness 3 weeks ago:
The only northern lights I’ve ever seen were in Iceland. Honestly, the conditions were less than ideal and what I did see was very dim to the naked eye.
What a lot of people don’t know is that a camera (like on your phone) picks up even the faintest aurora with ease. I have pictures that make the whole thing look many times more vibrant than what I could see.
- Comment on How far do you wear your daily shoes out before bothering to replace them? 3 weeks ago:
Where it gets really crazy is where you have a few pairs that you rotate through for “daily wear”. A whole decade can slip by before you go “how long have I had these?”
I don’t care a whole lot about fashion so “until they stop working correctly” is about the best answer I can give.
- Comment on What a great idea 3 weeks ago:
It’s really the worst. For the uninitiated, the platen where your bags go is actually a scale. The self-check-kiosk software waits for this bagging scale to quit moving (see: de-bouncing) before weighing and approving the scan and purchase of a single item. This is why, occasionally, if you’re too fast or too slow, the kiosk gets angry and makes you flag down an attendant.
That’s not a problem for 10 items or less, but for a whole cart? All that waiting around adds up. Because of all that, it’s literally impossible to achieve the same or better speed than an employee.
- Comment on Such a dreamy guy 3 weeks ago:
Jeorgia?
- Comment on dating 3 weeks ago:
like sifting through resumes.
Then we need to call it what it is: This exchange is an HR screen.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.
- Comment on Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public 3 weeks ago:
As far as I recall, that’s how it went.
- Comment on Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public 4 weeks ago:
I was gonna say this is at least Digg 3.0.
- Comment on What a great idea 4 weeks ago:
That’s a good call. I kinda/sorta figured that the fire department would see it sooner or later, but that’s clearly not the case.
- Comment on What a great idea 4 weeks ago:
It might be a matter of just being under a rock for the last 10-20 years. Retail PoS systems have changed quite a bit in that time, but how you interface with gas pumps and dining, hasn’t changed at all.
Also: a lot of folks navigate digital systems by rote memorization and don’t read or think all that much. If you throw a new interface in front of them, just sit back and watch the bewilderment. Gotta give people like that time to learn it all.
- Comment on What a great idea 4 weeks ago:
Sadly, we still do. But it’s really more a matter of vendor preference these days, since some places (usually small/personal operations) don’t do digital payments. That and nobody carries large amounts of cash around, so checks are the only alternative.
That said, anyone that hasn’t moved on to prefer a bank card or credit-card is behind the times, or doesn’t have a bank account. Still, it’s rare to see these days, especially at the grocery store.
- Comment on What a great idea 4 weeks ago:
This is the core problem, right here. At a minimum, people need training to learn what information to ignore so you can navigate the whole thing. Even if you know the store’s layout, you still need to have the will to ignore advertising and disregard extraneous information. Being a fast reader that can do fast mental math, also helps tremendously.
Traffic flow is another problem. Wegmans is the chief offender here, IMO, by putting impulse items in massive crates that crowd the store entrance+exit combo. It amazes me that it’s not a fire hazard, because it makes entering the store a nightmare. But most grocery stores have awful choke points in produce, dairy, meat, and other high-traffic areas. And of course those are the stores that have no small carts or hand-baskets, obligating customers to gum up the works with big metal baskets that are 70% empty.
A better idea is a store that doesn’t flood your eye sockets with information you don’t absolutely need. Get rid of the special displays, end-cap bullshit, and vendor promotional stuff. Then, normalize all the price tags and include unit cost per lb/oz/L/whatever to make bargain hunting a snap. Then, measure the fucking carts and make sure that two can get by everywhere in the store. Finally, pick a store layout and stick to it. </rant>
I want to say that Aldi is already doing all of the right things, but I could be wrong.
- Comment on Definitely the safest source for advice 4 weeks ago:
In my greater friend-group, we call them “shamans”, and rotate responsibilities when people go on trips. Like a designated driver or lifeguard, it’s a position of elevated and celebrated importance, even though the traveler may not ever leave their couch.
and most importantly be human
Now that I think about it, it’s key to be the most human possible. People do irritating and annoying stuff when they toss sobriety out the window, and sometimes it takes a lot of compassion and empathy to manage.
- Comment on Mama! 4 weeks ago:
While I’ve never seen it illustrated until now, I thought it was kind of obvious that this is our reality from outside our solar system. Is it not?
- Comment on MFW I wake up to find Lemmy feeds full of USA stuff 4 weeks ago:
Eh, I give it a 4/10 right now. There’s still some cool stuff to do and plenty of great people around, but generally, can’t recommend it if you don’t have to.
- Comment on Adderall vape? 4 weeks ago:
I know a handful of oddball pharma trivia facts, but that’s a new one on me. It’s just wild that a drug could even do that.
- Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 4 weeks ago:
It’s worth adding that, if you are arrested, that phone is a treasure-trove of potential liability that will absolutely get used against you. Also, you’re probably not getting it back, so you’re better off without it. Carry cash, a map if you must, and coordinate rally points and fallback locations with your friends ahead of time.
A proper camera is a good tip, but make sure the camera memory and storage card are wiped ahead of time.